The Mad and the Furious: Till All Are Mad
by Nhaz
Summary: Was Fury Road only a dream? Whatever it was, Max finds himself alone on the road again.
1. Rise Up

My name is Max.

At least that's what I think. Sometimes I'm not sure I have a name at all. Some time ago a friend asked me about it and I told her, but it all seems like just another one of my hallucinations.

Must have really been knocked out good to have a dream like the one I got. A brutal tyrant, an army of brainwashed slaves, and a tough-as-nails woman driving a nitro-boosted war machine to take on them all with a just bunch of misfits.

Quite the dream. Fighting side by side with someone every inch the road warrior you are.

But in the dream, they took everything from me. My blood, my weapons, my car which was then crushed like a tin can with a screaming low-life behind the wheel. It felt very real. As was the pain of someone tattooing my entire medical history on my back, putting a nuzzle on me and draining my blood to feed a brainwashed boy who only wanted to die fighting because he knew nothing better.

Then again, how do I go from falling asleep in a cozy place with green gardens to waking up again in the desert, half-buried in sand?

It was all a dream, that's how. Which gets proven by what I see not half a klik before me.

My car, standing on the road.

The car jolts, then folds in on itself and turns into a giant metal man.

And then I no longer know what's a dream and what isn't.


	2. The Rig Chooses the Driver

The buggy was no War Rig, but she was still happy enough with its speed. Still, Furiosa missed the rig. She had carved that machine out of scraps and made it work, made it her own. Her friend, even. A mechanical, speechless friend. Not quite like that other friend of hers, who did happen to say a word every other leap year. But he was nowhere to be found either.

So she was alone. She had to run for her life now, and couldn't even take the wives. The Mothers, they were now. They had their fortress, and the Dag had been learning to take headshots like the Keeper of Seeds, and in their fortified gardens they could withstand a siege by the War Boys for a time. This was the price to pay for trying to reform a cult of living weapons.

It had all happened without warning. There she was, believing she could finally do some good, leading the people of the Citadel to a future where they would help one another and build a better home for everyone, not trample on each other's head like they had in Joe's time. Perhaps it had been the Wives rubbing off on her. Why had she believed? They knew nothing of war. She should have listened to what Max said. If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane, he had said, and she had failed to fix it. She noted that the man was appearing on her thoughts a bit too often.

The buggy jolted and Furiosa barely had the time to steel herself as it sunk beneath the road with a crash. Blasted Buzzards. Even when she was sure she had taken care to exterminate them from all around the Citadel, their traps still lay all over the place. Just her luck, wasn't it?

The buggy was now impaled on several spikes, each three feet long. Thankfully, she hadn't shared its fate and only had a scratch on her thigh from where her reflexes had narrowly saved her leg. She snuck out of the ruined car and clambered out of the pit, clutching her rifle. A quick look around told her she wasn't the first to fall into a trap here. The landscape was dotted with several abandoned vehicles, lying like rotting carcasses, some flipped on their sides or even upside down, left to rust. Another two buggies, which had undoubtedly belonged to a War Boy party she had sent to these parts, a Buzzard car whose driver had been stupid enough to fall into his own trap, and-

That was impossible. Some distance away from the other husks she saw something that made her question her sanity. Right in front of her stood the War Rig. She knew that it was impossible, that she was probably in some delirious dream and any minute now she would wake up screaming for water, but it felt real. Too real.

Cautious, Furiosa walked closer. There was no mistake - it was the very same vehicle she had cobbled together from scrap. Every plate she had bolted, every pipe and hull and spike she had welded onto the battered chassis, everything was there, just as it had been before the Lovely Day. She reached out and touched the muzzle.

To her surprise, the rig was not as dusty as it had appeared, and what she thought to just be dirt and grime that made it look patchy reddish and blueish instead of its usual black was actually faded paint. Whoever had taken the time to salvage and rebuild her War Rig with such amazing accuracy had the resources to give it a gaudy paint job. No matter. In this dead world of ravagers and marauders the chutzpah to paint a truck in red flames on blue had probably gotten him into the trouble he was looking for, and quite some time ago too, if the peeling paint was any indication. She ran a hand along the hood, reaching to touch the superchargers, then forward to the vehicle's grate. She hardly needed to look, so familiar she was with everything about the rig, feeling as if she was getting reunited not with a simple truck, but with a dragon, like the ones in a worn-out fairytale book she had gotten from one of Joe's wives when she was younger.

Just as Furiosa's fingers ran over where Joe's emblem would be - the people at the citadel had been quick to remove it from everywhere, but she reckoned it would still decorate the truck - she felt something unfamiliar. Something smoother and more angular. She turned to see a small emblem of a face stylized like a shield. It was, unlike anything else about the rig, without a scratch.

Furiosa raced toward the cab. As expected, the door hung open, whoever had been the last driver likely having deserted the relative safety it offered. Inside it wasn't quite like what she remembered. It was cleaner, despite the outwardly deserted appearance of the rig. On the steering wheel, just as on the muzzle, stood not Joe's flaming skull in a gear, but the strange face symbol.

She needed to get out of here, fast. The War Boys probably weren't far behind. With any luck, even with the meager tools she had managed to grab, she could at least try to salvage some parts, fix any of the vehicles quickly enough and escape. She threw a longing look at the giant rig. In a perfect world she'd rush to repair it and ride off into the sunrise, not worrying about fuel or anything else, but as powerful as it had been, it was a gas guzzler. The thought of dismantling it made her sick, like she was one of the War Boys preying off someone else's blood. Then again, it was thanks to Max's blood that she was alive now, and that thought gave her strength. She fetched her bag from her buggy's wreckage, and after a quick look at the others she decided to first pilfer the steering wheel off the rig. She climbed back inside, grabbed the wheel with the silver face and pulled.

There was a strange, electric sound as the wheel jolted out of her grip. The whole vehicle shook violently, then everything was a whirl of twisting metal. Seats, doors, lids, axles, engines, everything shifted and turned all around her. She grasped her seat tightly, but just then it pulled back, lifted and she had to clutch one armrest as the backrest split into two, then the whole thing hauled her through the rig's back and hoisted her into the air. The mechanical appendage on which it was attached moved with surprising stability, allowing her to see that the vehicle's whole frame was heavily segmented and altered. Just as her former seat - now looking vaguely like a giant hand - stopped moving so she could climb up and sit in the palm, she saw the cabin rise from the chassis, which split in two and stood upright, the back end flattening like a pair of soles as it hit the ground. From a chasm in the roof a large rotund object sprouted, and Furiosa found herself looking into the vaguely human face of a humongous statue. A robot, old Miss Kitty had called those. She used to lump them in with dragons, in the same bunch of things from the old world about which no one knew anymore whether they came from fairy tales or news. After some time news had begun to sound stranger than children's tales, she used to say, so anything could be written off as fantasy unless they saw it with their own eyes.

The thought of eyes made Furiosa look at the statue's face which had an all-too-human looking pair thereof. Halfway between actual eyes and the battered cameras in Joe's throne room (she was familiar with those, having tinkered with them several times), the round objects fixed themselves on her, their apertures widening. Illogical as it was, blue diodes were flickering right inside the cameras, where the sensors should be. That made about as much sense to Furiosa as the Doof Warrior's amps tied to a listening post, but she decided to keep that to herself.

"Do not move", a deep, reverberating voice came from the robot's head above, though Furiosa couldn't see any amps. Strangely, its intonation was way too human-like for what she had heard of robots. Probably a piloted vehicle.

"Are you alone?", the thing asked, sounding wary. "Do not lie to me."

"'M alone", she nodded gingerly. "On the run."

All of a sudden, she had to cling for her life as the seat beneath her - the robot's palm - shifted. The metal fingers shifted and caught her by the waist, clamping around her ribcage and making it hard for her to breathe. She let out a ragged scream, kicked and banged at them with her mechanical arm, but the robot didn't loosen his grip and she quieted down, seeing resistance was useless.

"Imperator Furiosa", it rumbled. "You are in Colonel Joe Moore's service. Where are his troops?"

The formal tone was just as unexpected as the robot - or its pilot - knowing her name and former rank.

"Immortan Joe's dead", she offered apprehensively.

"Who killed him? Who is in command now?"

"You seem to know too much", she growled, "So I'm not telling you anything else until I kow who I'm talking to. How did you rebuild my war rig? Who are you? Show yourself."

The plate behind the statue's eyes split in two and retracted, but instead of a driver hiding there it revealed a human-like nose and mouth, giving the thing the appearance of a weary, aging man. It bore more than a passing resemblance to the shiny emblem she had seen before. So it was true. That really was a robot.

"What are you?"

"An Autonomous Robotic Organism", Furiosa watched in awe as the metal man's face moved exactly like a human one. "otherwise known as an Autobot. Now tell me, human. Who is in command of Colonel Moore's army?", the robot insisted.

"Someone that wants me dead", she let an exasperated sigh, hoping that he would finally shut up about it. "I have no interest in ratting you out to them, if that's what you're afraid of."

"Then perhaps we could be of some use to each other. "

Furiosa just waited for the Autobot to offer his terms.

"You claim to be on the run", he said. "Are you currently being pursued?"

"I think I lost them."

The metal man's posture visibly relaxed.

"Perhaps I could transport you to a human settlement", he offered, "if you were to repair my steering system. It is quite similar to that of human vehicles"

She cocked an eyebrow.

"You'll burn all my fuel for less than a klik."

She could swear that the robot smirked a little, like the Vuvalini when she was a girl asking if cars needed food.

"I utilise another kind of fuel which is much more efficient", the robot elaborated. "If you can repair me once I transform into vehicular mode, it would last for a considerable amount of time."

Furiosa squinted. It was all mad. Efficient fuel and grandfatherly robots. But then again, she really wanted to avoid being run down by the War Boys. Who would do such a thing? Well, she answered herself immediately, Max would.

"I'll see what I can do", she said at last, eyeing the giant's face. "Before I start, one thing. Drop me."

With surprising gentleness the robot extended the arm he was holding her in and let her down, then stood upright. Only now she realised he was about as tall as Joe's whole citadel.

"On second thought, two things", she said, still thinking of Max. "You already know my name, now you give me yours."

His face lit by the morning sun, the robot knelt and looked down at her with a solemn expression.

"Optimus", he said at last. "Optimus Prime."


End file.
